For implanting artificial teeth into a jaw bone, two-piece dental implants are increasingly used, which include an implant body screwable into the jaw bone and an abutment insertable into the implant body and connectable to the implant body, to which the dental prosthesis generally referred to as superstructure, for example a crown or a removable prosthesis, is fastened.
After inserting the implant body into the jaw bone, in order to align the angle between the longitudinal axis of the implant body and the longitudinal axis of the abutment protruding from the implant body in such a manner that the abutment points substantially into the same direction as the axis of the adjacent teeth or dental implants, it is known to insert abutments at different angles, which in the art are also referred to as angulations.
Since it is moreover required for the optimal adaptation of the superstructure to also consider the type of the abutment and the height of the gingiva when selecting a suitable abutment, so that subsequently an optimal fitting accuracy of the dental prosthesis results, manufacturers in practice provide a plurality of possible abutment variations for a dental implant, from which the dentist or the dental laboratory has to select the most suitable variation so as to obtain a satisfactory outcome at the end of a treatment.
In this way, the applicant for example distributes implant systems under the designation “Ankylos”, in which in total five different types of abutments, having respectively four different gingival heights and combined have six different angulations for each abutment type and gingival height, are used. This results in a total of approximately 120 different variations of abutments, from which the dentist after inserting the implant body must select the most suitable variation.
In order to prevent, for cost reasons, that a respective quantity of applicable real abutments must be stocked when selecting a suitable variation in practice trial abutments are conventionally used, which are for example manufactured from plastic material and are stored in a storage container having, for example, 120 individual compartments similar to a display case. In this instance, the dentist must be very experienced to select the suitable variation from the plurality of trial abutments in a targeted manner. Within this context, a further problem results from keeping the trial abutments in the storage container sterile or to again sterilize the trial abutments after the trial insertion into an implant body and to introduce the trial abutments into the respective compartment of the storage container.